by Jo Storm
She looked at him and shrugged. “I don’t know. You never know, right?”
His face cleared and he laughed. “Right. You never know.”
The cold night seemed to recede a bit, and Hannah relaxed. They were going to be okay. They might not be friends, but at least they had things in common now. And that was all she really needed until they got to Jonny Swede’s and she got the snowmobile. After that, she didn’t really care.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hannah woke to find a sheen of frost on her sleeping bag, despite the fact they were inside a tent — this was the result of the moisture from her and Peter’s breathing. At the first sign of movement, Sencha whined from the vestibule, crinkling Peter’s emergency blanket, which Hannah had placed around her before going to bed. Her own emergency blanket had fallen off sometime during the night. Hannah sat up, gasping at the cold, and opened the zipper of her sleeping bag. Sencha shot inside it. Peter, waking to the movement, drew back in alarm, but the Dal wasn’t interested in anything but Hannah’s warm sleeping bag. She crawled in and lay down with a series of groans and huffs, shivering dramatically.
Hannah went outside and Peter scrambled after her, donning his toque and shuddering as he closed his jacket tightly.
“By the Jesus, it’s cold,” he said between chattering teeth. “Minus fifteen, at least.”
They stamped their feet and slapped their arms to get blood flowing into their hands and feet. The fire had gone out long ago, but they covered it carefully with snow before setting up the heat shield and the stove and warming up breakfast. Hannah took out two energy bars, as well. There were three bars and three packets left, but they wouldn’t need them once they got to Jonny’s, so she took the third energy bar and broke it up, feeding half to Sencha and half to Bogey. The sled dogs looked the same as they always did, long and efficient, but the house dogs were changing; their flanks were leaner, and the muscles on their back legs were visible even when they were just standing there without moving. Bogey’s shoulders had additional bulk on them, and Sencha’s chest reminded Hannah of a horse’s — deep and padded and wide. Despite eating breakfast, Hannah was starving, and she said so.
“Don’t worry, Jonny’ll make us pancakes,” said Peter. “He loves making pancakes. And his own syrup, special. And breakfast sausages, too.”
“Good, and just in time, too,” said Hannah. She pointed back behind them. “Looks like a big storm is coming in.”
She shivered, not from the cold, but from anticipation. She enjoyed a few minutes of daydreaming about sliding into Timmins, getting the insulin, then getting an escort back, maybe even with an OPP officer, or maybe — she let herself dream big — an RCMP officer, because it was an emergency. She might even make it into the papers. Her parents would let her go to the sports camp for sure after that. They couldn’t say no.
Then she told herself that she couldn’t be weak now, so close to the end. She roused the dogs, and they stood and stretched and shook. Shards of ice fell off Bogey’s ruff, and his muzzle had a white fringe, but he was not shivering. In fact, he kept looking back as he made off to do his business, waiting until she turned away before going.
Hannah devised a makeshift coat for Sencha using one of her shirts. It seemed to help, but she was still concerned about the short-haired dog’s belly, which was bare, so she tied extra material there and wrapped lead lines around Sencha’s torso to keep it in place.
Plumes of steam rose from their faces into the morning air. It was cold. It was very cold. So cold that stopping for even a minute as they packed up meant that the cold went from knocking on the door of their lungs to stepping right inside the veranda of their parkas, the pantry of their leggings, the mudroom of their boots. The cold air stepped in and stayed until they forced it out with movement, whooshing warm air back into the house of their clothes by sheer effort. Hannah put a scarf over her face, because breathing through her nose made her nose hair freeze and her sinuses hurt. For the first time since they had fled Jeb’s cabin, the sun was out, but its weak light didn’t even warm their faces. All it did was highlight their breath, showcasing how cold it was.
Finally ready, they pulled away from their trampled little campsite. It was sure to be back the way they’d found it within a few hours, after the wind scoured the lake.
After they left the lake, the wilderness clasped them again, offering tree branches like old friends, and Hannah reached out as they slid past, giving them a high five. The branches creaked and shuddered, dumping the enormous amount of snow that had held them down so low, then springing up and rousing the whole tree until a mini avalanche of snow cascaded to the ground.
The trail was so obscured with snow now that only its bevelled edges and the absence of trees indicated that it was a trail at all. Sometimes Peter walked, and sometimes he rode in the sled while Hannah walked. They were letting the dogs rest a bit as they now had to break trail as well as pull.
By the time she glimpsed the dark blob of Jonny Swede’s house, Hannah was plenty warm from alternately snowshoeing and poling. As they rounded the last corner, she felt sweat trickling down her back, and she grabbed her water bottle from the inside of her jacket. Peter drank, too. He caught her eye and lifted his water bottle. His mood had lightened as they had gotten nearer. He said, “Pancakes!” again and started toward the cabin at a half jog on his snowshoes.
Jonny Swede’s place was nothing like what Hannah had thought it would be. She had expected a shack, something even more dilapidated than Jeb’s cabin, with rough, streaky, unpainted boarding on the outside, a warped tin roof, an ill-fitting door. The guy had an old bus for an outhouse, right?
But it wasn’t like that. It was small and neat and, even from the back, organized. The aluminum chimney top looked so clean against the sky that she wondered if Jonny polished it. As they approached, she stared at the paraphernalia hanging on the back of the cabin. Secured by long iron nails hammered on the back wall under the wide overhang of the roof was every piece of junk she could think of: long-handled hoes and seeders; shovels of all types; tires in pairs and alone, all in neat rows according to size. There were three old handsaws, one as long as her gangline, all bundled together and perched on thick pitted nails, at arm’s reach. There were big pliers, too, and tracks for snowmobiles, their black rubber links held together with metal grommets and bearings.
The snowmobile! Hannah’s heartbeat sped up, and her breath steamed out in short puffs, matching the dogs’ panting breaths. In the winter, a snowmobile could travel as fast as a regular vehicle, if not faster. Regular vehicles had to make their way on old logging roads to get to the secondary roads. From there, they had to wind onto the highway, which was itself an old logging road. Even though it was paved now and had two lanes, it wasn’t an easy road; it meandered and dipped and cornered its way back to town. But the snowmobile trails had been made for one reason: getting to Timmins.
“Hey, Jonny Swede!” called Peter as he broke through the ring of trees around the tiny backyard behind the cabin. On the far left-hand side, incredibly, there really was an old bus, now half-buried in snow. The front part, with the driver’s seat, had been kept almost exactly as it was, including the long bus doors that hinged in the centre as well as on the side. She could see through the door that the steering wheel had been removed, but the seat remained, now facing the doors. Hannah imagined looking out the glass doors as she sat on the privy, with a view onto the back of the house and the forest. The other half of the bus had been made over into a big yellow lean-to with bus windows still intact, letting in light. One metal side had been cut and peeled outward and propped on thick posts made of tree trunks. On the bench at the back of the lean-to sat a neat row of engines and parts.
She stopped the sled and tied the snub line, looping it around a tree, then followed Peter.
She was right behind him as they rounded the corner of the house, slogging through the unbroken snow. Peter was still calling. The front yard, larger than the back, had a
wide driveway leading off to the road, which she could see from the porch. She stood on the deck, stamping the snow off her snowshoes. The driveway was not cleared.
“He’s half-deaf,” said Peter, and he began to pound on the door. It was peculiar-looking, wide and low and made from thick wood. It had two metal bars across it, like on metal emergency exit doors. The bars reached only halfway across the door, but they were fastened together in the middle by a large padlock.
The shiny chimney. The half-buried outhouse. Hannah touched Peter’s shoulder and he stopped pounding on the door. She pointed up. “No smoke. No tracks.” She lifted the padlock and let it fall. It clanged metallically against the bars, then stilled.
“Shit. Shit!” he said.
Jonny wasn’t there.
Not only was Jonny Swede’s place not what Hannah had expected, it was also downright frustrating. In addition to the padlocked door, every window was fastened tightly with thick wooden storm shutters nailed shut over top of it. The tool shed in the front was locked. The woodshed also had a locked door on it.
“Who locks their woodshed?” she said after they’d trooped out to it, hoping to find a key to the cabin.
“Paranoid asshole,” muttered Peter. “Jesus, he doesn’t even have anything worth stealing.” He was swearing more and more as they found each entrance impassable and felt each hope crushed.
The only window that wasn’t shuttered was up in the crawlspace at the top of the cabin, and they had no way to reach it.
It was while they were looking up at the small window that Hannah tripped over something buried in the snow. They dug frantically for five minutes, shoving the tips of their snowshoes down like shovels and dragging up huge clumps of the heavy, white snow. Finding a tarp, they used their hands and feet to free it from the layers of snow and ice that had accumulated during the storm. The snowmobile!
“If there’s enough gas, we’ll go right to Jeb’s after we go to Timmins,” said Hannah as they dug. “Or maybe he has extra gas here. My mom will pay for it.”
She didn’t think long about what to do with the dogs. It would be faster if Peter stayed behind with them. They could break one of the shutters, maybe, and they could all stay inside. It would be warm there until she came back with help and the police.
Peter was wrestling with a trapped corner, and he pulled upward viciously. “I’m not going to Timmins. I’m taking the sled and going back to Jeb’s. You can use the satellite phone there. They’ll send someone out. Your mom is probably fine, anyway.” He pulled again and the tarp ripped free, tearing on one side and leaving long, fluttering pieces of plastic.
“We’re not going back!” said Hannah.
“Whatever. You don’t even know how to use a snowmobile.”
“I do so! And it’s not like you know how to drive a sled!”
“Move.” Peter pushed her aside and straddled the machine, placing his feet on the long runners on either side. He pulled the gas tank up and looked inside, pulled the throttle to make sure it worked. Then he leaned over, looking on either side of the engine, and turned the gas line to ON. He reached for the ignition switch. “Oh, come on. Come on!” His gloved hand formed into a fist and he pounded at the centre of the snowmobile, between the gas tank and the steering post.
“No no no no NO!” he shouted. He was hitting something in particular, and beneath his striking fist, Hannah saw it: the keyhole where the ignition key went.
It was empty.
The snowmobile was useless. The boarded-up house was useless, and the locked sheds, the empty lean-to, the stupid yellow bus. All of it was useless to them.
Hannah tried to stay positive, swivelling around to find something, anything they could use. But there was nothing. Just the naked forest, the white snow smothering everything, the grey sky pushing down.
She could see the dogsled and the dogs from where they were. Nook, Rudy, and Bogey were lying down, but Sencha was standing. Over the makeshift coat, her blue sled harness stood out from the monochrome of winter. When Hannah’s gaze drifted to her, Sencha’s tail wagged and she sat, watching.
Waiting.
Ready.
“Peter,” she said. He was still punching the snowmobile. “Peter!”
“What!” he snarled.
“We’ll keep going, okay? We’ll keep going to Timmins.” She could look past his stubbornness. And it was better to have two people together than two people alone. Anyway, she doubted they could break through those shutters.
“Hannah, we are not … going … to Timmins.”
“Why not? We’re almost there, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not. But we’re not going there. We’re going back.”
“Back? We can’t go back. Jeb —”
“We’re going back!” he said, pushing himself out of the seat and climbing off the snowmobile.
They couldn’t go back. It was two days out, and they were only one day from Timmins, she was sure of it. “Peter, we can’t! If we don’t go to Timmins, my mom could die!”
“Jeb has bullets!” he shouted back. “She’s sick, and she’s alone. Do you know what she could do to herself? She gets so scared, she once thought some snowmen at the park were the enemy … she wanted a gun so she could shoot at them! And nobody cares, nobody’s there to help her because my dad is too chickenshit to deal and the Army abandoned her. It’s just me and her. No. We’re going back. You can use the satellite phone. Or not, I don’t care.” He groped around for his discarded snowshoes.
He sounded so sure. As though he had already decided. As though it was always going to be this way, even if Jonny Swede had been there to help them. She remembered how reluctant he’d been to take the shirt and the gloves from her. It was because he had been planning to do this, to thwart her plans and do exactly as he wanted.
She looked at him accusingly. “All this time, you were planning to just go back. You lied.”
“Yeah, well so did you.”
“You knew I needed to get to Timmins!”
“You tried to act like you’d just let Jonny decide what was best, but the whole time you were planning to wheedle and nag him into doing what you wanted, weren’t you? Because you knew he’d side with me, with family.”
Hannah felt hot shame rush to her face. Peter was right; she had been planning to do just that. “My mom needs help! And he’s not your real family.”
“He is family,” snapped Peter. “Just because he’s not blood-related doesn’t mean he’s not family. He helps us because he wants to, not because he can get something out of it. He’s not like your goddamn family. He would have taken my side and you know it, so you were planning all along to screw me over and get what you wanted. You lied to me.”
Peter’s face was swathed in frost as he shouted, little pieces of it sticking to his scraggly facial hair and fogging his glasses. Off to their right, chickadees chirped in the bush, flitting around an empty bird feeder.
“Yeah?” she shouted back. “Well, I don’t need you, and I didn’t need this stupid machine, either,” she said, pushing ineffectually at the handlebar of the snowmobile, which she was still leaning on. “I’ll get there on my own, and you can freeze and die walking back because you’ll probably get lost since you’re too stupid to even know where you are!”
“I’m tired of you bossing me around and giving me free stuff like I’m some charity. Screw you, Hannah. My mom could die, Peter,” he mimicked. “Yeah, right. You wouldn’t know hard times if they slapped you in the face.” He threw the tarp haphazardly over the snowmobile and put his snowshoes back on.
She stood back, her fists clenched and her mood ugly. “You don’t have to slag off my mom just because you don’t have one!”
He’d finished putting his snowshoes on, and he stood up and looked at her. His eyes were dark and his lips white, his face twisted. “You’re just a snotty little city girl. Go to hell,” he said, starting back toward the sled, lifting his snowshoes high to cl
ear the snow.
She stared after him, so numb with shock and disappointment — they had worked so hard, and it had seemed so natural that they’d do what she thought best. Wasn’t she the leader? — that she could only watch as each of his snowshoes lifted, dripping snow, canted, then hit the snow again as he drove it angrily through the snowpack.
Eight, nine, ten steps, and then his right foot came up, dripped, canted, came down — but it did not hit flat. Instead, it bulged in the middle as the snowshoe hit something hard and solid, and Peter yelled, then leaned sideways, losing his balance. He fell on his side in the snow and grabbed his right leg with both hands.
Hannah fumbled with her snowshoes and stumbled over to where he lay. He had taken a glove off and was rocking back and forth, holding his leg. Beside him, the long spiky handle of an old hand plow stuck out of the snow, the shearing pin sticking up at an angle. His snowshoe dangled from his foot, and there was a jagged rip in the side of his pants, from his ankle to his knee. She could see that his foot had gone right through the sinew and lashing of the snowshoe, and the shearing pin had acted as a knife along one side of it and up Peter’s leg. The smell of fuel lingered, and she realized that, although they had cleaned the shoes as best they could, the spilled fuel had eaten through the webbing of his snowshoes. The resistant force of the plow coupled with his angry stomping had broken the webbing. His snowshoes were useless now.
“You idiot,” she said.
She looked up the length of his woollen pants and saw that his leg was bleeding; the blood was darkening the blue wool to black in a slow stain near his knee that curled over itself like a hook.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Peter rocked back and forth, still trying to hold his leg, but every time he touched it, he winced and moved his hand away. He was swearing, his face contorted in pain.
Hannah looked up. They were about twenty feet from the dogs. She took off her gloves and knelt down. “Let me see,” she said. He tried to clasp his leg again. She pushed his hand away and peeled back the torn fabric.